What I enjoy the most about being an academic, is to interact with interested and motivated students. This year I feel so lucky to have not one, but two Master by Research students (Electra Poluha and Jamie Smith) who will be working on the effect of climate change on fertility limits in butterflies. The study species we have chosen is the large white butterfly, Pieris brassicae. This multivoltine species - with two or more generations per year in the UK - is warm-loving and yet declining in abundance in Lincolnshire (see this great website by Pete Smith for up-to-date information on all butterfly species found in the county). Luke Crosby had lots of fun this summer chasing female butterflies with Electra. He then looked after the clutches, young larvae and followed them all the way to pupation and into the new generation of adults! Luke then bred the adults and the second generation are now pupating ready for the experiments that Electra, Jamie, my collaborator Paul Eady and I, will be having lots of fun planning. I must thank Luke for all the work he has put in over the summer - none of this would be have been possible without him!
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This year I have been so lucky to have not one, but three students selecting my summer studentship projects. These are projects that usually last between 6 and 8 weeks and are designed to give a flavour of research to undergraduate students. Last year I had fun surveying local pollinators and estimating range shifts in beetles in England with my summer students. This year, I am collaborating with my colleague Marcello Ruta to look at insect egg morphometrics (project 1) and simulating heatwave effects on butterflies (project 2). Lucy Boulton and Connor Hutchings are joining Marcello and I digitising egg images from over 120 insect families to analyse shape and outlines of lots of beautiful eggs to understand more about shared character ancestry. Meanwhile Electra Poluha has helped Luke Crosby catch and raise large white butterflies (also known as cabbage white) Pieris brassicae, for my field experiment simulating heatwave conditions. I can definitely say these projects are the highlight of my year! Last year I stumbled across this wonderful initiative by PlantLife, a charity dedicated to the conservation of wild plants, called the Road Verge Campaign. With half a million kilometres of road verges in the UK, this is one of the largest semi-natural habitats, one that the campaign aims to preserve. Not only road verges contain precious habitat for wild flowers, pollinators, small mammals and other wildlife, but are a potential corridor to connect other habitats, such woodland and meadows. As I became aware of the campaign, my local landowner (Beeswax by Sir James Dyson) started to cut the road verges around our house almost every two weeks. I should add that this is public land, but it is cut for road safety even if we have some of the quietest roads in the county (and country) as we live in an unclassified country lane. Moreover, rather than cut within 2 metres of the road, which are the least important for pollinators, they were cut extensively. Together with our neighbours, we wrote to the business manager who was sympathetic but, despite our efforts, the cuts continued. Possibly this was simply due to a lack of communication with the staff on the ground riding the mowers. Thankfully this year I have only seen the mowers once. Today, on a glorious sunny morning, I decided to take some pictures of my local walk, for 'future reference' as it were. If we all look after our 'local patch' be it garden, allotment, roundabout or road verge, we will make a difference for our dwindling wildlife.
I am really excited to advertise a Masters by Research part-funded by the British Ecological Society working with me, Dr Paul Eady and Dr Micheal Gillman on studying heatwave effects on the large white butterfly, Pieris brassicae. Insects are facing multiple threats, including land use change, intensive agricultural practices, pesticides and climate change. This masters will address some of the mechanisms driving insect declines and the effects of increase in average temperatures on population persistence with a mix of field experiments and modelling. Do you like butterflies and would you like working in the beautiful Riseholme campus at the outskirts of the small and friendly city of Lincoln, UK? The School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln is a vibrant and international department, and our Evolution and Ecology research group covers a wide range of topics, from evolutionary ecology, to biomechanics and paleontology. If you are interested, please send me a 2-page CV and a letter explaining why you'd like to apply by the 5 March 2021. The full application can be found on our School website, under current studentships opportunities for the School of Life Sciences. First a huge apology to my summer students. I promised to upload their posters, the fruit of their hard work from their summer internships. Sadly the semester started and ....that was it! I simply forgot. To my make up for this, I am writing a long overdue blog post on what they set off to do and their findings.
Brooke found a very interesting published dataset on the scarce and threatened beetles of Great Britain (Hubble 2014). She decided to focus on the change in stag beetles (Coleoptera, Lucaenidae) range distribution over the last four decades in southern England. She found that stag beetles have advanced north as the average temperature has increased. Luke and I collected data on plant/pollinator visitation rates in our gardens. Mine is in a rural location and Luke's is in the city of Lincoln. He compared visitation rates in the rural and urban gardens by date, according to climatic variables and then analysed the community structures at both sites. He looked at species richness, abundance and a variety of properties of the plant/pollinator communities, such as nestedness (a measure of the structure and co-occurrence of species in a community) and connectance (a measure of the complexity of species interactions). Luke found that while the country garden was more biodiverse and nested, the urban garden had more links per specie - which is a trait of a healthy community. It's been such fun to supervise Luke and Brooke - I wish them well in their studies! The harvest mouse, aptly named Micromys minutus, the minute mouse, is Britain's smallest rodent and also one of the most understudied. Before Ellie's started her Masters by Research supervised by Carl Soulsbury and I, the last comprehensive review of its status and distribution in Britain was chiefly the one by Stephen Harris in 1979 (although later works do exist).
Ellie set out to map out the distribution of the harvest mouse in Lincolnshire, a primarily agricultural county and one of the largest. In collaboration with the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, Ellie spent a very long time dissecting owl pellets and Longworth trapping to provide a current snapshot and compare it to previous records. The good news is that harvest mice appear to have persisted in the county. To help inform conservation action, Ellie also analysed the co-occurrence of harvest mice and other small mammals and various environmental landscape features. Finally, she used population viability analysis to assess the minimum population size and habitat area required for population viability, as well as overall population resilience. Ellie's work has been featured by the newsletter of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, the bulletin of the Lincolnshire Naturalist Union and the 'Student of the month' highlight of the Mammal Society. Congratulations to Ellie! Can butterflies survive heatwaves in the UK? If you're intrigued by this question why not come and work with me on a self-funded Masters by Research at the University of Lincoln? You'll gain skills ranging from dissections in the lab to working with the large white butterfly (Pieris brassicae) in the field, plus analytical and writing skills, and help shape our understanding of the mechanisms behind reproductive failure in insects under temperature extremes. You'll also be part of the Evolution and Ecology research group a vibrant and welcoming team, with many members' research focusing on insects from bio-acoustics and biomechanics, to life histories, eco-immunology and cognition. Any questions or if you'd like to know more, please email me. How does antimicrobial resistance transfer from livestock to the environment? Which interventions to poultry litter could improve management practices in Argentina and other low and middle-income countries? What does the scientific evidence show?
If you are you interested in these questions, and have a keen interest in shaping and influencing policy around antimicrobial resistance, do get in touch with Professor Lisa Collins and I - we have a postdoc position available based at the University of Leeds but collaborating me, at the University of Lincoln. The work will integrate data from a wider project into a systems model to identify key predictors for the emergence and transmission of antimicrobial resistance bacteria within the broiler agri-system. You will get to work with stakeholders in Argentina and the UK, work as part of a large team of researchers across multiple disciplines both in the UK and overseas - It's going to be exciting! Our department every year organises competitive summer studentships for our undergraduate students at level one and level two. This year, due to the restrictions imposed by the government to tackle the global coronavirus pandemic, no field or lab work were allowed. However, I have been collecting plant/pollinator visitation rates in my garden shortly after the country went in lockdown, so I thought this would make a good summer project. I offered two studentships and was very lucky to receive some excellent applications. The two students who have been working with me for a month now, Luke and Brooke, have been so engaging and interested. Luke is going to compare plant/pollinator visitation rates between his urban and my rural garden and correlate this with weather patterns - temperature, rainfall and windspeed. Brooke is interested in comparing the abundance of scarce beetles (from the National Biodiversity Atlas), in two locations in southern England and correlate this with weather patterns over the last few decades. After such a long time isolating, it is so nice to be back exchanging ideas and looking at data with students. |
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August 2023
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